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Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says

• GenerWork 3y ago
  I find it odd how Apple has seemingly dropped the ball with Siri. Don't all newer iPhones have some sort of neural chip or something that could help Siri expand its capabilities? It's strange that Amazon is so far ahead with Alexa and Siri is lagging.
• bsima 3y ago
  The skepticism is strange to me because Siri is extremely well positioned. All Apple has to do is add a GPT-like backend, put Siri in everyone's iMessage, and boom ChatGPT is dead in the water.
  • flatiron 3y ago
    I’m not sure everyone will get your sarcasm. Just “adding some GPT” is a good meme though.
• chicnextdoor11 3y ago
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• inkandfable2 3y ago
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• onetokeoverthe 3y ago
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• SanjayMehta 3y ago
  Siri is good for setting alarms and timers.
• deadofwrite09 3y ago
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• deleted 3y ago
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• bricedouglas 3y ago
  Not surprised. No major expansion in functionality for years
• purpleblue 3y ago
  Siri is mostly useless. It works about half the time for me. When I ask it to do a task like create a timer, it works, but asking it questions is almost useless. One time I asked "What is a picometer?" and it gave an answer from Wikipedia, but then I immediately asked "What is a femtometer?" and it said it couldn't answer it on the iPhone. My wife gets amused whenever I use Siri because half the time I'll start swearing in frustration at how stupid it is, and yet like Charlie Brown and Lucy, I keep trying to kick that football.
  • dna_polymerase 3y ago
    “This is what I found on the web for XYZ”… all the time! At this point, they should just pipe the #1 search result into ChatGPT for a nice summary and have Siri read that out loud. It would be so much better.
    • jandrese 3y ago
      Yes! My big complaint about Siri is that she's just the same old "here is a list of preprogrammed actions you can perform, with a fallback to just dumping it in a Google searchbox" but you don't get access to the list. So finding what she can do involves outright guessing, scouring the web, or closely watching Apple demos. She can do quite a bit, but you'll never find 90+% of the options because Apple only shows you a small handful of suggestions. https://support.apple.com/siri https://support.apple.com/siri Discoverability is a huge problem. Also, Siri can't launch apps, which seems like it should be an extremely common operation. "Hey Siri, launch Words with Friends".
      • DHPersonal 3y ago
        Try "Hey Siri, open Words with Friends"; at least on my iPhone, Siri can usually open apps for me when I use that phrasing.
• whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  Can tell they downgraded the long range microphones somewhere between iPhone 4 and 7, might be even worse in later models because it really struggles to pick up you shouting across the room at it when it used to work pretty well on the 4. Then again the only thing I've used it for since launch is setting timers, rarely gets that right these days.
  • lldb 3y ago
    I don’t think the iPhone 4 had always on siri.
    • moepstar 3y ago
      It had, as long as the phone was charging. IIRC, "always on" Siri came with the 4s
• ghaff 3y ago
  At least Siri doesn't pester you to buy various things or to use it for additional purposes like Alexa does as far as I know. But, yeah, all the voice assistants are pretty bad or at least bad enough that I mostly give up trying to use them for anything other than certain rote tasks. Siri may or may not be marginally worse but none of them are good enough to, say, really use hands-off in a car unless I've carefully pre-defined tasks to perform. (e.g. pick from a handful of memorized playlist names).
  • noncoml 3y ago
    > At least Siri doesn't pester you to buy various things or to use it for additional purposes like Alexa does as far as I know. I was pretty happy with Alexa until they started that crap. Retired it immediately. Now I only have a HomePod but even on this I have Siri disabled. Amazon screwed the reputation of the voice robots for everyone
    • mataug 3y ago
      > Amazon screwed the reputation of the voice robots for everyone I don't think amazon screwed the reputation of anyone's assistant but their own. Plenty of people I know use voice assistants at home, none use Alexa. Voice assistants are genuinely useful for some scenarios, especially in the smart home space.
  • deergomoo 3y ago
    Gah, my mother has a few Echoes dotted about her house and it’s the only inanimate object I feel compelled to tell to shut the hell up on a regular basis. Give me a direct response if warranted, otherwise a simple chime or acknowledgement. Multiple years into ownership no-one wants a “by the way…” with upsells to other Amazon services. It’s even worse if the reason you were talking to it in the first place is to turn something down so you can actually speak to someone.
    • jabroni_salad 3y ago
      Make a routine with these commands. It has to run daily because those cowards at amazon aren't quite ready to let us off the upsell leash. 1. Set volume to 0 2. "Turn off by the way" 3. Set volume back to your preferred. I wonder what the conversion on 'by the way' is. Like how many BTWs have played and how many customers have taken alexa up on that offer?
• neurobama 3y ago
  I generally like Siri and rarely experience bugs. I use it to set timers, get the weather, play music via Spotify, occasionally dictate text messages, and look up trivia mid-conversation. It's been my replacement for Alexa ever since I got creeped out by Amazon's audio data retention. In this context I'm suprised to hear Apple employees are unhappy with it.
  • jaypeg25 3y ago
    Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are all generally good at those things but honestly not much else. I use my Google Home every day for timers and to turn on/off lights. I don't think any of them will ever be the helpful AI that they were initially promoted as, though.
    • Pxtl 3y ago
      I'm shocked how much the quality of Google Assistant has degraded over time. I have a Mini that consistently misunderstands broadcast requests and says "sorry I'm not playing anything right now". When it occasionally speech-to-text converts a broadcast word, it consistently cuts off the first word or letter, even when it's "I'll be right down" users will get "L L be right down". It used to support simple offline requests like SMS and Navigate when data was unavailable. No more. It used to integrate with Google Keep. No more. No longer recognizes the word "torch" as a synonym for flashlight. Why would I be asking to turn on my phone's "porch"? Painfully slow replies, even under ideal network environment... Just spinning forever, often until a timeout that it doesn't even have the decency to respond with a proper error message. It's just amazing how they launched a product with a clear "this is where we are, this is our vision of where we're going" and they still sell it but instead they're going in the opposite direction.
      • nneonneo 3y ago
        See, at least Siri usually is ready to take your input the moment you press the button, even if it then casually discards your input because it can’t reach apple’s servers or whatever. Google Maps: I swear, about half the time I try to activate voice search, it sits and spins before even accepting any voice input at all. Why can’t it just start reading the microphone right when I activate it, and then submit the saved audio whenever it’s done getting set up? It’s so abysmally poor that it’s usually faster to scroll through recent destinations or literally grab the phone, unlock, and put in a destination. This is just a market begging to be disrupted. I want to see a startup combine Whisper, GPT, and a competent TTS model into a killer voice UI!
• neilv 3y ago
  > The report today explains that Google wanted these three engineers “badly enough that its CEO, Sundar Pichai, personally wooed the group.” How do they conduct the interviews, in that situation? Not the usual tech megacorp brogrammer "technical interview" hazing?
  • rm_-rf_slash 3y ago
    “Thank you for coming. As you know, I am a busy man so let’s get started: iterating numbers 1 to 100, every third number print Fizz…”
  • Mountain_Skies 3y ago
    Hopefully they skip that step but it is weird how often a recruiting process goes from having a recruiter cold contact you with platitudes singing your praises and how valuable you would be to their company and then the next step is to have a group of interviewers demanding to know why you're worthy of being in their presence while expecting you operate like a broken clone of Google and also recite CS theory that has never been even slightly applicable to the open position. But at least the 'inside-out condom' brain teaser has finally gone out of favor.
    • neilv 3y ago
      Sigh, I've been on the receiving end of that multiple times. :) In some companies (the ones that aren't just cargo-culting or on autopilot) I'd bet that someone in HR/compcommittee consciously intends it to be hazing rather than evaluation. Maybe theory like that it makes the company psychologically seem more attractive (the brain thinks, if you're jumping through hoops for them, there must be a reason), and to take candidate's ego down a notch so they're less demanding in compensation negotiation.
  • catiopatio 3y ago
    Generally, you sit down to a meal or coffee with the executive in question; they answer your questions and try to convince you to join. That conversation might span a few sit-downs or extend into e-mails. If you eventually say “yes”, you’ll be funneled into the hiring pipeline midstream, skipping the entire front-end process. It’s largely a formality — HR is told to hire you unless there’s a glaring red flag. When I’ve been in that position, I wasn’t even asked for my resume until after we’d already negotiated my compensation, solely for inclusion in my HR file.
• sharkweek 3y ago
  I love my iPhone, it's a great device. However, quite literally the only two things I use Siri for are asking "what song is this?" and "set a timer for X minutes." I'm sure there are ways I could be using it for any number of things that might improve some routine process in my life, but I never found them.
  • wiredfool 3y ago
    The timer, sometimes, and occasionally I try to get Siri to play something in the car so I don't have to look at my phone. It normally fails -- it will play something random from apple music before it plays anything from my library.
    • mthoms 3y ago
      This drives me nuts. I get it, sometimes albums and songs have similar names. It seems like Siri should be able to deduce which I'm asking for given I've listened to one album over a hundred times and never listened to the random thing with the same name it decides to pull up.
  • jurassicfoxy 3y ago
    The most impressive thing I can get Siri to do is "Hey Siri, play my <playlist name> on Spotify", and it works consistently. "Hey Siri, reply." is another decent one, but it seems to be working poorly lately.
• rm_-rf_slash 3y ago
  > The company’s senior leaders haven’t shown much stomach for the kinds of headline-grabbing gaffes ChatGPT and similar services have stumbled into over the last several months. Risk aversion from immature tech is a part of Apple’s DNA. It should be no surprise that Apple declined to push Siri beyond its limited capabilities. LLMs are quite new and Apple has plenty of cash to hire star devs to catch things up. Writing off Apple’s AI future is premature.
  • amelius 3y ago
    You can't be apologetic about Apple by using some possible future scenario. Siri sucks, and just about everybody agrees.
    • rm_-rf_slash 3y ago
      If you are betting that Siri will be the same 10 years from now, I will not join you.
      • amelius 3y ago
        Perhaps, but who cares now?
  • gilmore606 3y ago
    > Risk aversion from immature tech Boy, that Simpsons episode where they make fun of the Newton really burned them bad.
• deleted 3y ago
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• jhwhite 3y ago
  I used to have Google Home and moved to Homepod Minis. I should have ran them side by side, but that would have gotten very confusing for other people in the family. Siri is fine at controlling smart home devices, giving weather, timers, etc...but if you ask it questions more times that not it wants you to use your phone. Google Home handled that so much better. We have Apple Music and have Homepods around the house so we use it for that.
  • 4rt 3y ago
    <kitchen homepod> "Hey siri set a timer for 5 minutes" "hey siri what timers are running" -> "it's 10:45am" "hey siri how long left on the timer" -> "there's one timer with 5 minutes remaining" <bedroom homepod> "hey siri list all timers" -> "there are no timers set" "hey siri how long left on the timer" -> "it's 10:45am"
• eachro 3y ago
  I'd have expected speech recognition software to be good enough that you could have direct speech -> gpt type services. It almost feels like traveling to the past when asking things of Siri when I otherwise get very useful responses from chatgpt.
  • shagie 3y ago
    Speech to text is already excellent with an iDevice. Turn off WIFI and put it in airplane mode... then open up notes, hit the microphone and start some transcription. If you say "Buy a two by four" the transcription goes from Buy Buy a Buy a two Buy a two by Buy a 2 x 4 "Four inches by three inches" For Four inches Four inches by 4" by 3 4" by 3" And that's all on device. The issue is that when going to GPT, that's going to cost someone a few pennies each time a request is made. When that's scaled up to the installed base of all Macs and iDevices that gets expensive fast.
• cmdrk 3y ago
  I rarely use Siri, but my technophobe elderly parents have embraced it as a fairly intuitive way to navigate their phone settings, contacts list, etc.
• PaulStatezny 3y ago
  I don't use Siri all day, every day. It's certainly not perfect. But did you know you can say things like... "Turn off the Apple TV." "Turn off low power mode." "Stop navigating." "Open [name of app I don't want to spend time finding in my iOS folders]" "What song is this?" (Listens and usually is able to discover the name/artist of the song in the background.) So when people say things like, "Siri is mostly useless," I think – wow, that is a very hyperbolic statement.
  • mthoms 3y ago
    It's useless beyond manipulating iDevices, navigation tasks and simple questions. Even then, if you don't ask in the exact right way it often doesn't work.
    • lolinder 3y ago
      Is this any different than Alexa or Google, though? I guess Google is probably better at looking up facts and Alexa at ordering stuff (if buying things without even seeing a picture is your thing), but neither is that useful. Is this not just a case of voice interfaces being much harder to do right than people originally hoped? (I say this as someone who has a Google Home that I use regularly, but mostly as a kitchen timer and music player.)
      • 8ytecoder 3y ago
        I mentioned an example in another comment - basic manipulation of timers don’t work well - like, adding time to an existing timer. When I’m working in the kitchen this is really useful. There are also major performance issues - “working on it” and “sorry can you say that again” are probably two of it’s most common utterances. Random bus like “there’s nothing playing” and the wrong siri taking over the request from a million miles away and you just can’t even hear is extra annoying.
        • toast0 3y ago
          Google Home is pretty bad at adding time to existing timers too. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it creates a second timer with a difficult to access name. Personally, I'm become convinced a good talking/listening clock is actually a useful thing, but Google isn't providing it, and it sounds like Apple isn't either.
• bluejekyll 3y ago
  Ok, maybe I’m an outlier here, but I love Siri on my HomePods. It does what I want in enough cases that it’s useful, multiple timers while cooking, setting them and canceling them when I am putting things in or taking it out of the oven. Granted, I have very few things I use it for, but I like it. The kids like them in their rooms too. I’m happy with Siri, but maybe I don’t ask it to do much.
  • robbyking 3y ago
    That's the trick with Siri. I use it on my Apple Watch when I'm riding my bike with an AirPod in: "Siri, play this podcast," or "Siri, call so-and-so." I think the secret is low expectations.
    • bluejekyll 3y ago
      I send text messages with it while on my bike as well. It usually works fine and gets the point across.
• nineplay 3y ago
  Every company has engineers who don't like some products or features. We aren't mindless corporates drones. I don't personally use any of my employer's applications. Some article like this comes up every so often and it's so non-newsworthy. Anyone who's been at a project planning meeting knows there's a small contingent of engineers in the corner muttering that it's a terrible idea and it will never work.
• nneonneo 3y ago
  I’m frankly surprised that Siri hasn’t moved to on-device voice recognition. It’s by far my biggest complaint with Siri: random, unpredictable delays or outright failures to recognize simple messages because the network is unstable or unavailable. There’s other trash too: the other day I tried asking Siri to play a song from my library, but it misinterpreted the song title and proceeded to activate a seven day trial of Apple Music Voice to play some random track on Apple Music. I didn’t ask for that subscription! To be fair, for the tiny subset of functionality I do use - navigate by voice, set timers, get terrible jokes to amuse passengers - it works fine.
  • mrbombastic 3y ago
    Yes, incredibly frustrating that to ask Siri to play a song from your library on your device you need a network connection.
  • moconnor 3y ago
    Siri does use on-device voice recognition. Active airplane mode and you can still use it. Edit: for some commands only it seems. I agree with OP, this is odd.
    • shagie 3y ago
      Its a question of if it can determine the intent ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit ) on device or if it needs to go to the cloud to understand it.
    • yellowait44 3y ago
      Not on HomePods as far I as know.
    • nneonneo 3y ago
      Seems like it does - cool! - but why does it sometimes spin for several seconds when faced with a seemingly simple request? I'm guessing it has some path where it tries to use the network if possible, but if the network is spotty then the requests timeout and it reports a failure?
• Animats 3y ago
  "Assistant" type devices which can actually do things besides reply can't yet use large language models safely. LLMs need to get past the problem of making up stuff when they don't know something. Until then, it's not safe to give them power over devices.
  • valine 3y ago
    There’s nothing particularly unsafe about LLMs. Giving Sirious access to a weather api and timers is not gonna break the world. If anything, giving LLMs access to apis makes them less likely to hallucinate.
    • Animats 3y ago
      Huh? If they have control of door locks, there's a problem.
      • valine 3y ago
        Why is that a problem? If you don't want the model to access your doors you disable it at the API level. Siri already has an option for that today.
  • 8ytecoder 3y ago
    They can - if we split it into parsing, execution and response. If LLMs only do parsing and response and execution is limited to actions that are prepogrammed, i think we’ll have a much better assistant. Like, it could be interactive and natural. But i agrees that it shouldn’t be given unfettered access to do whatever it wants.
• bparsons 3y ago
  Outside of driving, I never really understood the popular use case for these voice assistants. In most situations it is easier to type your query rather than say it out loud. It was a novelty touted as a big leap in technology.
  • johnny22 3y ago
    it's for when you can't type reasonably isn't i? Like while you're cooking you might say "skip to next song" or "set a timer for 10 minutes" or something. That's how people describe it anyways.
  • throwaway_ab 3y ago
    I use Siri to turn on voice control when I drive. I have voice control number every item on the screen. This lets me have 100% control of every feature/button and every app whilst I drive. I can swipe on the screen using my voice. I can write notes and messages. I can switch to any app. Voice control is a world leading accessibility feature that is a complete touch replacement controlled via voice. Once I no longer need voice control I turn it off via Siri. The entire action of turning it on, using it, turning it off occurs with no touch at any point. Also it's great for when I am cooking or doing diy and don't want to touch my phone. In comparison Siri is better at a few narrowly defined actions but has less than 1% of the scope of voice control. Reading people's complaints about Siri in this thread I feel what most people actually want is voice control. But no one outside the visually impaired community knows about it.
• MrFantastic 3y ago
  Since iOS 16, Siri has gotten dramatically less accurate for me on my Iphone 13 Pro. WebGL has been screwed since 16.4
• devmor 3y ago
  I'm glad I'm not the only one. I find it annoying, intrusive and not useful for anything at all. The only times I ever try to use it intentionally (like asking it to take a note, or make a hands free call while I'm driving) - it screws up or requires clarification to which I have to give screen attention, defeating the purpose. Most of the time it just pops up and annoys me when I call my wife "sweetie".
• ianferrel 3y ago
  Siri seems to be actively getting worse to me. Not necessarily at understanding commands, but at the verbosity of its replies. Recently, when I ask it to "Send a text to <name> that says <content of text>" it says something like "I notice you often send texts to <name> using Apple Messages, so I will use that for this text. Is that Ok?" before reading me back the text and then sending it. I'm sure that there are people out there who have a rich and complicated mapping of text-communication-app to recipients, but I literally have only one text communication app on my phone, the one that it came with, and I only ever use that. It's already annoyingly slow to interact with Siri on a multi-step process, and adding another step to it is awful.
• aroundtown 3y ago
  Apple and other mega corps really need to spend some money investing in training/education for these highly specific fields. Advancement in Siri shouldn't be dependent on 3 people that were lost to Google. I know a bunch of capable programmers that would love the chance to go into one of these specialties but don't have the resources nor opportunities (time/money/location) to go back to school. Siri could be so much better.
• Dennip 3y ago
  I use Siri fairly frequently for setting timers, controlling my smart home and the like, but for me where it falls down is really understanding natural language. Personally I found that google assistant was way way ahead of siri in this regard. I could ask it to do something and it would just understand what I want. One issue I frequently have with siri is that commands that work one day suddenly don't the next. If I ask siri to "lock screen" it tries to find smart home door locks (which i dont have) instead of locking the device screen, eventually I figure out some combination of lock device/screen/phone screen/off etc that works, so siri does know how to do this but isn't smart enough to figure out my intent. The other issue is that siri unlike google assistant can't maintain a train of thought, You can't say "hey siri dim the bedroom lights" and follow that up with "hey siri..a bit more" unlike with google where it seems to be aware of the context of what it did prior.
  • RandomWorker 3y ago
    The lock screen issue is really funny. Because I have the same experience where I will come home and say hey, Siri lock screen to close the navigation. However, now it doesn’t seem to work anymore and I have tried some of your prompts and some combination does work.
  • sorum 3y ago
    > where it falls down is really understanding natural language. I would settle for Siri understanding simple commands. Natural language is something for Apple customers in the 2040s. I want to not have to use creative language skills to decipher things in Reminders. "Who is this Paul Cage I'm supposed to call? Oh, repairing the pool cage." Forget LLM or natural language processing; Siri needs to catch up to 2018's Google Assistant
    • nanidin 3y ago
      Amazon mitigated bad speech transcription by providing a link to listen to the underlying audio. Apple has never offered this and it has led to lots of head scratching at the grocery store as I work through my shopping list. It still beats trying to use the Alexa app while shopping, though.
• adam_arthur 3y ago
  What would Siri’s market share be if you could easily install Google assistant on iPhone? How much more investment would Apple have put into Siri if they had to compete? I haven’t noticed any improvement in Siri in close to a decade of being in the Apple ecosystem. The most frustrating thing is that every time I ask it to “turn the lights on”, it thinks I’m saying “off”. I grew up in the US and have no notable accent or mumble. Note that there are hacky ways to add google assistant, but it doesn’t get integrated into the OS in the same way
  • jamiek88 3y ago
    Do you actually use google assistant? The grass ain’t greener, it is rubbish too.
• ubermonkey 3y ago
  "Even" implies a consensus that I don't think exists except in the minds of people who find hating something recreational. Siri works pretty fucking well in my experience, but that experience is colored by my understanding of what it is, and what it's good at. You have to be aware of what makes a good Siri question or task. Technical people tend to understand this implicitly; we are, after all, talking to a computer, and computers are notoriously literal and have trouble with implied contexts, etc. I think I've talked about this here before, but my wife often phrases questions to Siri in a way that results in the dreaded "I can send the results to your iPhone" non-answer. One example I remember happened when we were idly talking about King Charles. My wife asked Siri "how old is king charles" and got the non-answer. I asked Siri "what year was king Charles born" and got hard data back. It's that kind of thing. In the narrow case of music there's more to complain about, I guess, but the base problem is specificity and name collision. It doesn't seem to always pull the example of any given non-unique name that I might want; sometimes I wonder if what i get is just random. If you ask for "Take Five", you MIGHT get Dave Brubeck. I'd argue that, in the absence of something specific, you SHOULD get Dave Brubeck, and moreover you should get the album cut from "Time Out." But Siri doesn't really agree, for whatever reason. OTOH, if you ask Siri to play "Take Five from the Dave Brubeck album Time Out" you'll get exactly what you want. Siri excels in simple, discrete asks or tasks, though. We both routinely use it to add things to the shared shopping list we keep in Reminders. That's kind of awesome, and beats the old norm of "go find a pen to add this to the list that you may or may not remember to take with you when you go shopping." Setting timers or alarms verbally is awesome. The list goes on.
  • daotoad 3y ago
    I have terrible luck with Spotify and Siri. These kinds of specific requests fail. I tried it with your prompt and Spotify started playing the whole album. Which is better than my usual outcome. Of course, it took three tries. The first two times Siri said it was going to play and nothing happened. Usually I don't even get the same artist or album I ask for. Admittedly, I stopped trying a few months ago, so maybe they've improved things a bit lately, or maybe I just got lucky.
    • 3y ago
• throwaway_ab 3y ago
  I use Siri to turn on/off voice control which lets me control my iPhone without touching it (it's a disability feature). When I no longer need voice control I use Siri to turn it off (I have my voice control set to label all actionable buttons on the screen so I like to turn it off when using my phone via touch.) I'm not visually impaired however I find voice control super useful when I want control of my phone and rather not use touch or in a situation where touch is impractical. Whilst Siri is good for certain tasks it lacks the ability to control every aspect of the phone whereas voice control is literally a replacement for touch control. By combining Siri and voice control I get fine grained complete control of every app when I need it, all enabled/disabled via my voice. Such a brilliant combination. Apple's attention to this disability feature is incredible. I only learnt about it after a visually impaired friend showed me how it works. I learnt that voice control/voice over is the reason most visually impaired people use iPhone due to Apple's dedication to building world leading accessibility features.
  • 0x6c6f6c 3y ago
    This is a surprising testimonial. My wife switched from a Pixel to iPhone and has utterly hated Siri and voice assist on iOS to the point she'd rather just deal with her hand pain. And it's a lot of pain. I've listened to see how bad it can be at understanding her, and it's appalling.
    • isoprophlex 3y ago
      Note that this is probably about an accessibility feature distinct from the horrors of getting Siri to understand that you want to call your mother; there's an option to label every clickable element, interacting with voice becomes much more sane and programmatic. "Click A, scroll down, click B", that sort of deal apple built Very Well.
    • kajecounterhack 3y ago
      I switched from a Pixel to iPhone and had to turn off Siri because the difference in quality is jarring. I'm also sad that I can't ask my Google Home to find my phone anymore, or use Google Assistant in the car with "Hey Google." But camera that can take more than 3 pictures rapidly + iMessage + magnetic charging + airpod/iwatch support + build quality are ultimately just more important features to have on a device I use every day. I hate that getting these features right means that Apple can forever get the other features wrong.
• hinkley 3y ago
  I don't know if it's programmed in or just cargo culting but if Siri accidentally triggers and starts talking to you, "Nobody asked you Siri" is my favorite way to get it to stop interacting. Said in the tone of Cobie Smulders in How I Met Your Mother (Nobody asked you PATRICE!)
  • esafak 3y ago
    I tell google to STFU
• jiggawatts 3y ago
  I get that they're wary of an LLM-based Siri making embarrassing mistakes. It would be a bad look if some kid's phone provided helpful instructions for killing themselves when asked. Mummy and Daddy would sue. However, directly answering queries is not the only way LLMs can be used. In fact, when ChatGPT 4 came out, the first thing I thought of was: "Wow, this could make Siri so much better!" For example, an LLM like GPT coupled with voice recognition was used to create Whisper, an AI that has nearly perfect text-from-audio recognition. One of my biggest gripes with Siri is that it is basically useless in a car because even slight background noise confuses its voice recognition. An LLM would fix this. Another point is that many people don't realise that LLMs re-read their entire input for every word they generate! Their writing speed is so-so, but they can read really fast even when running on mobile device hardware. Think 10K to 100K words per second. An LLM could read through all of the text on your device when prompted for search queries in a fraction of a second. As long as this was carefully set up, it wouldn't be able to produce "bad output", because it would just be matching data to your prompt. E.g.: Imagine GPT being prompted with: "Does this email match the query <q>? Say only YES if it does or NO if it does not. <email>" It doesn't matter if it occasionality hallucinates and outputs gibberish, you just mark that as a "NO" and move on. This is also very easy to train out of a specialised version of the model using reinforcement learning. PS: I just played around with GPT 4 to see how it behaves when asked to recognise requests for creating calendar entries, and it's pretty good. For example, it can correctly compute things like "next long weekend". Interestingly, ChatGPT 4 is already doing some similar prompt injection, and I can't override its sense of "current time". Apple's Siri team has failed really badly. Everyone else is sprinting away while they're not even aware there's a race going on.
  • caycep 3y ago
    I think reading the Information article, there were 2 issues, which it wasn't good at separating. The AI model sophistication and usage are one - and yeah, I think they could be more creative in using LLMs and such. But the other one seems to be a back end issue, i.e. that brief mention of "clunky database slowing down iterations/upgrades". That always seems to be an Apple Achilles heel...and I'd hope also they are NOT using that terrible IT infrastructure company (Agilent or whatever) to outsource their backend...
• wkat4242 3y ago
  I think Siri could really benefit from some LLM goodness. It's just too stupid. You have to deliver every command in bite-sized exactly worded chunks. Really annoying. But the tech is at a level where it can really improve it now. It also needs some persistence. It needs to know that I never want to play music on my homekit. I tried deleting all the music from itunes but that stupid free U2 album keeps coming back and it often thinks I want to play music instead of doing automation actions. And it should be able to read my texts and tell me if something important comes in. Stuff like that. AI models should be able to deliver those things. All this manually scripted stuff is a dead end.
• m3kw9 3y ago
  When your miss rate from experience is stuck around 20-30% for almost a decade, there is no future
• rickreynoldssf 3y ago
  It doesn't help that Apple doesn't let third party developers use it. The only SDK available for Homepod, is locked behind a bunch of approvals and the only thing it does is allow developers to implement music players. It's very specific to playing music. Not even Podcasts. Why can't an eCommerce app implement, "Hey Siri, tell Online Store to add Tidepods to my weekly order". ? What about Audible implementing, "Hey Siri, tell Audible to add Tale of Two Cities to my reading list." ? There's remnants of a car service interface that never got used or shipped AFAIK. If you ask "Hey Siri, get me an Uber to the train station". It just replies "sorry, I help with rides". Or maybe even work with other Apple stuff better. I can say "Hey Siri, turn on Television" and that works and then say "Hey Siri, mute television" and it will reply, "There are no televisions to control".
  • augment003 3y ago
    This is simply false, or at the very least outdated. Apps can definitely implement custom intents for Siri: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/technologies/siri/custom-intents https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
    • rickreynoldssf 3y ago
      Not on Homepod, the most likely device Siri would be used on.
• WonderBuilder 3y ago
  Honestly, I find Siri the most powerful popular voice assistant out there. Once you starting using Shortcuts, you can use Siri for literally anything. With just holding the power button, and a couple words, I can start tracking a run, schedule message a friend, record my thoughts, close all my tabs that contain the word "youtube"... And so much more! Shortcuts & Siri is honestly the main reason I switched from Android to iOS.
  • andelink 3y ago
    Agreed, Shortcuts are massively under utilized.
• MH15 3y ago
  Siri recently started mispronouncing simple words that it never mistook before on my iPhone. Phrases like "It's 65 degrees outside" now sound like "It ess 65". Really odd.
• idk1 3y ago
  Two pretty consistent frustrating issues I have are: Me: "Hey Siri, tell my Mike I'll send that document over in ten mins. How about pizza for lunch. I also spoke to Jenny and she would come for lunch too." Siri: "Calling mike." So cannot tell the difference between 'tell' and 'call', however Siri could use context and assume if I'm talking for quite a while after saying maybe tell or maybe call then it's most likely 'tell' because of the sentences afterwards. This is by far the most frustrating. Second issue is: Me: "Hey Siri - what's in my calendar today." Siri: "Playing alternative radio station." Such a tremendous amount of times music has started playing, I think the top thing on their "can't understand" code is to try and play music. About once a week Siri will take something I say about anything and start playing music instead. It's infuriating. I've deleting music from my phone but I can't delete it from TV / Homepod Mini / Mac. Edit: I've thought of a third which isn't so bad. Me: "Ask Hassan has the mortgage has gone out yet?" Siri: "Here's your message. `has the Moorgate has gone out yet.`" It will replace random words in sentences with locations, and locations, in the UK, any word it cannot get, it will first assume I'm talking about any town in the UK and use one of those. It is ludicrous the amount of priority it gives to names of towns, I've even had tiny villages inserted into sentences before.
  • nimbleplum40 3y ago
    I have the same experience… Me before bed: “Hey siri - turn off the lights” Siri: “Playing death metal”
• locusofself 3y ago
  I'm excited for a GPT or similar voice assistant. Asking siri basic questions and having it tell me it will send me some links on my phone is annoying. I have homepods in the living room and they aren't good for much besides music.
• lynx23 3y ago
  Siri, don't make me even start. I like much of what Apple does, but Siri is just hilariously bad. The error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years. Keywords are randomly being changed, sometimes they fire, a day later you have to use a different phrase to get what you want. They even broke "Where am I" at least in German. "Wo bin ich" is sometimes replied to with "Sein oder nicht sein" (to be or not to be) which indicates Siri is trying to be smart and fails totally. I am blind and use this feature when I have a feeling I might have been lost. Very funny if you ask a simply question like "Where am I" and your voice-assistant is fucking with you about pseudophilosophically. "Was läuft gerade" did also just fail a few hours ago. Siri just started to play something from my library, which is not what I wanted. All in all, its a embarrasing failure all around. Oh, and before I forget, when Siri fails to understand the name of the person I want to call, it says "OK, I am calling <your name>" and actually tries to dial my own number. This is so dumb, it feels like a joke put in there by an intern.
  • Avamander 3y ago
    The worst part about Siri in my opinion is how it can do bulk actions when it mishears you. You want the ceiling light off? Okay, turning off all the lights. Or the opposite, it turns *everything* on, which can be even more annoying.
    • pram 3y ago
      They're all complete crap. I use Google Home to ONLY turn my lights on or off and it gets it like 60% of the time. Sometimes it accepts the command and it just doesn't even work and says something went wrong. Pressing the light button in the app is 100% consistent. Incredible.
      • scottyah 3y ago
        I've been superstitiously switching between "turn the lights off" and "turn off the lights" (also with music). It seems like every few weeks or days it prefers one over the other.
• pavedwalden 3y ago
  I use Siri just for playing music, setting alarms, and reminders, but even there I run into bugs on a regular basis. One day she stopped being able to find songs from Apple Music, but could still play anything I'd saved to my phone (wasn't reception or CarPlay permissions or any of the obvious troubleshooting things you'd think, trust me I looked into it). Sometimes she'll also misinterpret commands for unclear reasons. "Tomorrow at 7am, remind me to call John" and she responds "Ok, I've turned on your 7am alarm". I try again, speaking more clearly, and she says "Your 7am alarm is already on"
• adityathakurxd 3y ago
  Siri is nice. Use it for a variety of things. Although would hurt if it is not worked on and improved.
• csujoy 3y ago
  Let's accept it! Apple sucks at anything that involves learning from large volumes of data.
• 64operator 3y ago
  It used to be smarter, I think they dumbed it down to save money or something.
• heliophobicdude 3y ago
  I switched to typing to Siri instead of using my voice [1]. I also disabled all triggers for Siri. Now I invoke it by pressing power button then type away. It's more useful than dictating when I need something quick and discretely. When chatbots arrive on iPhone, this is how I'll be talking to it. 1: https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/type-to-siri-ios/ https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/type-to-siri-ios/
• rednerrus 3y ago
  I've switched to using a Chat-GPT shortcut in lieu of Siri and it's absolutely amazing. Apple should figure out how to license GPT and run Siri through it.
  • heliophobicdude 3y ago
    Hi! Could you please share details of how yours works?
    • rednerrus 3y ago
      https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/448738a9ae9b4a5b9a647cb29ea3cfc6 https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/448738a9ae9b4a5b9a647cb29ea...
      • heliophobicdude 3y ago
        Thank you!
• alfalfasprout 3y ago
  This is a nonstory, tbh. The reality is Apple deeply cares about releasing a polished product. Releasing an LLM-based Siri that makes really bad gaffes would be a PR nightmare. Google already suffered that when it opened up Bard despite pushback from folks working on it. The fundamentals of LLM architectures, training, etc. are now no longer "secret sauce" tons of major tech companies are working on in-house LLMs at this point. I don't see Apple as not having a future for Siri, it's rather a silly conclusion that doesn't have much behind it at all
  • smt88 3y ago
    > The reality is Apple deeply cares about releasing a polished product This is absolutely untrue in the Tim Cook era. Apple releases buggy hardware and software all the time. This article talks about how they released a bad product and know it. Siri is significantly worse than both Google Assistant and Alexa, and even those are comically bad sometimes. Bugs in iOS and Siri give me rage aneurysms every single day (coming from a long-time Android user who just wanted a small phone).
    • mrguyorama 3y ago
      If you think this is limited to Tim Cook, you weren't paying attention. Every single release of macbooks had issues with heat killing GPUs and similar and apple always denied it being a design defect. Didn't steve jobs sit behind antennagate and bendgate?
      • smt88 3y ago
        The software was significantly more polished in the Jobs era. I don't know why, because it's not like it's something Jobs obsessed over more than Cook. Apple just doesn't seem to have "good software" in their DNA.
    • pschuegr 3y ago
      Yep. The reality is that Apple cares deeply about slick marketing. I've had great experiences with Apple hardware, personally, but the software frequently makes me shake my head.
• bdcravens 3y ago
  Many of things I used to use Siri for I've switched to Alexa after putting Echoes throughout my house. It's just better.
• izzydata 3y ago
  It would be funny if voice controlled devices came into being and disappeared before I even bothered to try them.
• jeromeof 3y ago
  I honestly don't know why Apple can't do their own ChatGPT. They have the money / resources to then implement something like the ChatGPT 'plugin' architecture so if someone wants to turn on their lights or get specific 'private' information that apple cannot give as 'training' data. i.e. callout to 'private' API's if appropriate to a sensible LLM generated response
  • generalizations 3y ago
    I'm expecting that they will - and considering the raw power of their local hardware, I think they have the best shot of anyone at cornering the AI assistant market. - private, on-device language model execution (see llama.cpp for feasibility) - a single, consistent AI available with you wherever you go - total access to your personal information / documents (knows your birthday, can see your meeting notes) Because they have the hardware to run it locally, they have three very hard-to-beat advantages: 1) privacy, because the LMs can see all your stuff but none of it goes back to apple. Microsoft can't do this; they get flak every time they try and phone home with telemetry, and they don't control their platform enough to run a massive LM in the background. 2) omnipresence: if you're in the apple ecosystem, you'll always have your iphone with you. That means the LM will have access to location data, maps, chat - everything. And since it never leaves the phone, privacy-oriented people may be ok with it. And that means the LM can be exponentially more useful than just summarizing documents. 3) evaluation costs - they are the only competitor who will not have to pay for a massive datacenter, which means that the LMs can be as powerful as the M2+ hardware they sell. Everyone else will have no alternative to running the LMs on their centralized, expensive hardware.
• mark_l_watson 3y ago
  I often leave home with just my Apple Watch, and for the simple things I do with my watch voice control via Siri and some tapping on the screen is definitely good enough for me. I think that all the deep learning models for handling speech on the Apple Watch are run locally on the watch.
• paracyst 3y ago
  Because it sucks. I tell it to turn off all of my alarms and instead it ends up calling my mother at 4 in the morning, causing her to panic, thinking there's an emergency.
• ChildOfChaos 3y ago
  Siri is not that bad, considering that Google Assistant is not great either. What do people use it for? mostly just to set alarms or turn of lights etc. With all this breakthrough in AI and things like Whisper which brings incredible voice recognition, these tools are ripe for an upgrade even though they have been stagnant for years. ChatGPT like abilities + voice assistant and these 'voice assistants' are relevant again and actually deliver on there original promise.
• geuis 3y ago
  I think I might be in the minority based on other comments here. I hate things like Siri and whatever Android phones have. It's incredibly rude every time I hear someone almost yelling into their phone in public. They get frustrated Siri doesn't work and loudly and slowly say whatever it is again like being mean to a dumb child. People speak out entire text messages and the replies. I'm not pointing out folks with disabilities. I'm talking about perfectly healthy adults who seem to have no sense of awareness around them. On my phone, I found it infuriating that Apple just inserted this Siri icon into the keyboard next to the spacebar. It took me a while to figure out how to disable it. I already have large hands, but my typing accuracy is pretty good and fast. When that icon was there, it reduced the width of the spacebar and return keys and made it impossible to type without Siri popping up every few lines. I think more broadly I have a prejudice against devices listening to me. I've never liked Alexa, Siri, or any other voice based automation system like customer support phone trees. Very rarely I've encounter a phone system that works well, but mostly these devices and systems are just infuriating to work with.
  • javawizard 3y ago
    > I'm not pointing out folks with disabilities. I'm talking about perfectly healthy adults who seem to have no sense of awareness around them. Careful. It's easy to overlook disabilities that may not be immediately externally visible. I have a friend who's heavily dyslexic. You'd never know it if you ran into her on the street; she's quite successful in her career. Yet she uses voice dictation when sending text messages because it's an order of magnitude less time and cognitive effort for her to write something out that way. I tend to think the world would be a better place if we were all just a little bit less judgemental of things we see others doing that we can't immediately explain.
    • geuis 3y ago
      That's a very fair criticism. I hope no one reading my parent comment thinks I'm disregarding people like your friend. I'm not. I'm referencing people who also think it's fine to loudly play music or have entire conversations with the phone speaker on in public.
    • 3y ago
• layer8 3y ago
  MacRumors’ related article [0] has some more interesing details: > By 2018, the team working on Siri had apparently "devolved into a mess, driven by petty turf battles between senior leaders and heated arguments over the direction of the assistant." Siri's leadership did not want to invest in building tools to analyse Siri's usage and engineers lacked the ability to obtain basic details such as how many people were using the virtual assistant and how often they were doing so. The data that was obtained about Siri coming from the data science and engineering team was simply not being used, with some former employees calling it "a waste of time and money." > Many Apple employees purportedly left the company because it was too slow to make decisions or too conservative in its approach to new AI technologies, including the large-language models that underpin chatbots like ChatGPT. Apple CEO Tim Cook personally attempted to persuade engineers who helped Apple modernize its search technology to stay at the company, before they left to work on large-language models at Google. > Apple executives are said to have dismissed proposals to give Siri the ability to conduct extended back-and-forth conversations, claiming that the feature would be difficult to control and gimmicky. > Cook and other senior executives requested changes to Siri to prevent embarassing responses and the company prefers Siri's responses to be pre-written by a team of around 20 writers, rather than AI-generated. There were also specific decisions to exclude information such as iPhone prices from Siri to push users directly to Apple's website instead. > Siri engineers working on the feature that uses material from the web to answer questions clashed with the design team over how accurate the responses had to be in 2019. The design team demanded a near-perfect accuracy rate before the feature could be released. > Engineers claim to have spent months persuading Siri designers that not every one of its answers needed human verification, a limitation that made it impossible to scale up Siri to answer the huge number of questions asked by users. Similarly, Apple's design team repeatedly rejected the feature that enabled users to report a concern or issue with the content of a Siri answer, preventing machine-learning engineers from understanding mistakes, because it wanted Siri to appear "all-knowing." > In 2019, the Siri team explored a project to rewrite the virtual assistant from scratch, codenamed "Blackbird." The effort sought to create a lightweight version of Siri that would delegate the creation of functions to app developers and would run on iPhones instead of the cloud to improve performance and privacy. Demos of Blackbird apparently prompted excitement among Apple employees owing to its utility and responsiveness. Blackbird competed with the work of two senior leaders on the Siri team who were responsible for helping Siri understand and respond to queries. These individuals pushed for their own project, codenamed " Siri X," for the 10th anniversary of the virtual assistant. The project simply aimed to move Siri's processing on-device for privacy reasons, without the lightweight, modular functionality of Blackbird. Hundreds of employees working on Blackbird were assigned to Siri X, which killed the ambitious project to make Siri more capable. This seems completely dysfunctional. [0] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/04/27/report-details-turmoil-behind-siri-and-apple-ai/ https://www.macrumors.com/2023/04/27/report-details-turmoil-...
• ninkendo 3y ago
  I’d love to see a survey of people’s hit/miss rate with Siri, but with the extra dimension of what accent they have and how thick it is. IME, Siri’s speech recognition is actually quite fantastic (I almost never have an issue with a dictated text message saying the wrong thing), but: - I have a very standard midwest american accent - I talk to siri like I’m a pilot talking to ATC: As clearly and succinctly as possible, never saying “umm”, “uh”, or having to correct myself, etc (this is actually an acquired skill that takes time) - I generally know what things Siri can do well and what it can’t (I try to phrase things in ways I know is less likely for Siri to misinterpret) My theory is that most people who have a bad experience either have a thick accent (and importantly don’t set the Siri language to something that matches their accent! there are multiple “English” settings in the Siri language, pick one that matches your accent!), don’t speak clearly/mumble, have a lot of noise in the environment, or some combination of the above.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • mgkimsal 3y ago
    Years ago, it seemed Siri would try to understand you via whatever voice accent you'd chosen it to speak in. If you wanted UK Siri, it would understand... a UK accent. Using a Siri UK voice, and speaking with a US midwest accent wouldn't always get you what you expected. I tried an Australian test, and did a (bad) video of it here: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/207295417 https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/207295417 Note this was... 8 years ago maybe? I forget exactly, but it doesn't seem to work this way any more.
    • ninkendo 3y ago
      Your video doesn’t show you changing the Siri voice though, you’re telling it your accent. There’s “Language”, which is your accent (“English (Australia)” in your case), and then “Siri Voice”, which is set to “Australian (Female)”. So of course if you tell it you have an Australian accent, but then speak with an American accent, words like “Light” will get confused, because the en_US “Light” sounds like the en_AU “Late”. If you have an American accent but want Siri to speak with an Australian one, set “Language” to “English - USA”, but then set “Siri Voice” to Australian. Don’t set Language to something that isn’t your accent!
• 23B1 3y ago
  I'm a screenwriter and my focus is on character NO MATTER WHAT. We watch movies because we love the characters inside the plot, inside the universe, and how they relate to each other. CHARACTER is the CORE DRIVER of all stories, be it the story of Beowulf or Star Wars or Succession. Period. Today, I am fortunate enough to be developing 'characters' and backstories for AI companies, and I think its working; the new prototypes I've been working on really feel more warm (or more logical, or more relatable, or more philosophical, depending on what we're trying to transmit). I think a lot of AI companies are really missing this important point, and I think Apple, of all companies, should have got this!
• CodeWriter23 3y ago
  My favorite Me: 16 minutes Siri: your timer is set for 16 minutes Me: 17 minutes Siri: 17 minutes and counting Me: 18 minutes Siri: I don’t understand that
• awisema 3y ago
  The claim that somehow LLMs as they stand are somehow the answer is disturbing. ChatGPTs ability to be authoritatively wrong is a serious problem… Just to see what it would do, I gave it a basic word problem the other day (two people drive towards each other) and it had the steps right, but buried in it was a simple logic error (it claimed that the two parties traveling at different speeds would travel the same distance in a unit of time). That it was good enough to seem trustworthy, made it worse…
  • CamperBob2 3y ago
    Did you try that with ChatGPT4, or 3.5? GPT4 has gotten better at this type of problem, it seems. I think the point people are making is that GPT models are getting better at an exciting/disturbing pace depending on one's point of view, while Siri has been around for years and has only gotten worse.
  • pbronez 3y ago
    Sure, but do you need Siri to solve logic riddles? I don't. I need it to reliably hit other APIs and shortcuts with some basic arguments. Check out OpenAI's ChatGPT plugins [0]. You can connect the LLM system to an external service with just an OpenAPI model and a natural language description of what it does. I want that, via voice. [0] https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins
• snapetom 3y ago
  I live 20 miles away from work. 3 times a week, I have to go in. For a while, every morning, I ask Siri directions to [name of my company] to gauge how bad traffic is and how long it will take. Every time, she gives me directions to some pub in Saskatchewan, 18 hour drive away, that shares no part of their name with the name of my company. I just gave up. Alexa is not much better. I set up voice recognition to turn on my espresso machine (Rocket is the brand). Every morning I wake up, I tell her to turn on my Rocket. For about 3 months, things worked perfectly. All of a sudden, half the time, she instead starts playing "She's a Rocket" by Robert Ealey, a thirty year-old song.
  • K7PJP 3y ago
    > For a while, every morning, I ask Siri directions to [name of my company] to gauge how bad traffic is and how long it will take. My work address is in my own contact entry. I'd just ask Siri to take me to work.
• huehehue 3y ago
  Maybe it's the emerging neo-Luddite in me, but I'm alarmed at how many people begrudgingly continue to use these tools (accessibility reasons notwithstanding, which is an admittedly major caveat). I have a very low tolerance for error in things like setting timers, playing music, getting weather, calling someone. This is because I can complete these tasks simply, quickly, and with 100% reliability by hand. The marginal improvements allowed by tools like Siri aren't worth it to me if there is any decrease in reliability. I'm sure there are use cases I'm not considering, but I've also seen perfectly able-bodied folks shout "call Steve" into their phone for 40 seconds longer than it would have taken to navigate manually. Conceptually, the idea of stacking even more engineering onto these tools to get these tasks working reliably is funny.
  • rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
    Siri is tremendously frustrating to me, but helpful to my parents whose eyes are going bad. For all Google's faults, the Google assistant is years ahead of Siri and Alexa at natural language comprehension. It's not perfect, but it clears my bar, and it comes in handy a few times per day.
  • mrtranscendence 3y ago
    It doesn't matter how frequently Siri gets things wrong, my wife insists on using it for everything. The number of times I've heard her repeat herself to Siri five times in an increasingly frustrated tone is pretty high. It's baffling.
  • mmmmmbop 3y ago
    Nah, I'll have to disagree with you there. I don't know about Siri, but I am one of those people using the Google Assistant to set timers and reminders, and for me at least, this is reliable (enough), and definitely faster than by hand. The obvious use case is setting a timer while cooking, when the phone is at the other end of the room and your hands may be dirty, but I'm using it even in non-cooking settings. In fact, I just tried it and timed both approaches for setting a reminder. Results: * Assistant: "Hey Google, set a reminder 10 days from now to file my taxes.": 4.5s to say it (I'm free to focus on other things after this point), 7.5s until reminder is created. * Manual (pick up & unlock phone, open app drawer, open Calendar app, find the day 10 days from now, click on that day, click create a reminder, type in "file my taxes", save): 17s
• sarks_nz 3y ago
  I love Siri with Apple Maps in New Zealand /s Me: "Siri, give me directions to vaguely ethnic sounding café" where café is about 2km away. Siri: "Getting directions to other cafe in London/Europe/Tajikistan". So theres no line of code that says "If found location if >2000kms away with no direct land route and/or crosses multiple continents, it might not be the right one" Google Maps and voice works pretty flawlessly.
• michelb 3y ago
  The reasons sound very Apple-like. The current template-based Siri is not cutting it, but I do get the fact Apple does not want Siri to give wrong or incorrect info. People already go bonkers if an Apple Maps route is incorrect. Given that the current LLM's are routinely giving false information, I'm betting Apple is simply waiting on another leap or two in models, and slowly rewriting Siri in the meantime. I'm having a good time playing with LLM's, but I certainly don't trust any output at face value. I know I would value a correct answer from Siri, or any other service.
• cubefox 3y ago
  Here is the original article: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apples-siri-chief-struggles-as-new-ai-era-begins https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apples-siri-chief-st...
• gwbas1c 3y ago
  I found voice controls in anything to be so clunky in the early 2010s that I just rolled my eyes at things like Siri and smart speakers. I've never even tried them.
• IOT_Apprentice 3y ago
  Build a new team, start over, add in LLM & go for it.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• dang 3y ago
  I wish we didn't have blogspam on HN but theinformation.com, which used to unlock certain articles for HN readers, doesn't answer my emails anymore. Totally fair on their part but the story (and thread!) are interesting and only the blogspam is publicly readable...so here we are.
• amatwl 3y ago
  All voice assistants seem bad, but Siri seems particularly bad. God forbid I ask it to do something simple such as playing a specific artist or album on Apple Music or ask it to turn off lights I've configured in the Home app. "Siri, please turn off all the lights in my apartment." "Sure, which room?" Sigh.
• gumby 3y ago
  Siri is Steve jobs’ version of the disastrous Newton handwriting problem. Unlike the Newton they don’t seem to have fixed it … or better yet, replaced it. I’m surprised Giannandrea hasn’t junked it by now.
• andsoitis 3y ago
  not only can voice input never be a universal input mechanism that is seamless (so limits reach of application), Apple's specific implementation is just janky.
• epaga 3y ago
  Siri is without a doubt in my mind the most embarrassing thing Apple has had on the market in the past 20 years. With ChatGPT it is now feeling like Siri the broken tricycle is being compared to a Lamborghini. Honestly I would have been concerned if Apple employees weren’t frustrated with Siri. Pretty sure they need to take Siri out to pasture and start some LLM-based project from scratch.
  • pentae 3y ago
    It's even more embarrassing when you look at the old Apple commercials introducing Siri up to 11 years ago, here's one from the rock when they introduced the iPhone 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhLGBY5_0zU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhLGBY5_0zU Anyone thats used Siri will watch that and laugh at how absurd it is that someone could get even one of those voice commands to work the first time. I'm surprised there hasn't been a class action lawsuit for false advertising. I can barely get it to start a timer on my apple watch sometimes.
    • jakey_bakey 3y ago
      Great ad though, Apple's always had it
    • BulgarianIdiot 3y ago
      Siri was better earlier on. In fact they were better before Apple bought them than ever after. And the primary reason is optimization of cost and scale. And something similar is happening to GPT although not to that extent. Bing has gotten worse over time as they use a pipeline of models, where smaller models serve most common and easily predictable tokens, while the full model only handles the hard stuff. Except... you can't tell always what's hard stuff or not, so Bing serves useless distracted answers ignoring user context from time to time.
    • 4rt 3y ago
      The best bit about that ad is that my homepod replied to every 'hey siri ...' with an error. "Hey siri read me my last email" "I'm sorry I can't do that" "Hey siri list my reminders" "You can use the photos app to do that" "Hey siri show me my fashion line (?)" "You can try a search in your web browser"
• doubtfuluser 3y ago
  For me all of the current voice assistants have issues. Playing music seems to be super hard to get right if you don’t follow mainstream. Either you get a playlist with always the same titles, or it starts playing some obscure remixes. Home automation is in my opinion totally stupid to do by voice. The light should switch on when it is dark and I go into a room and should switch off when none is in the room. But using voice which 99% of the time works is “slower”, and in one percent of the time it is annoying if the light in my kids room switches in. I see use in the Knowledge augmented ChatGPT like assistants, since then I could reliably ask a digital assistant for information. Right now I know the moment the assistant starts answering with “this is what I found on the web” that it’s going to be wrong. Similar annoying is that Alexa for example seems to rewrite some requests, where I ask about “what is X” and I get the answer on “what is Y”. I’m pretty disillusioned and disappointed in all the different voice assistants out there, and I seriously think that voice on top of gpt will actually help me get more often what I want.
  • baby 3y ago
    There’s still a huge gap between google’s voice recognition and siri.
  • bombolo 3y ago
    > The light should switch on when it is dark and I go into a room and should switch off when none is in the room. What if you don't want to disturb someone sleeping? Do you sleep with the lights on? Do you watch movies with the lights on? Do you need the same amount of light to have dinner and to fix something?
• gnicholas 3y ago
  I asked Siri to call the San Mateo County Public Works Department. It called the Sheriff instead. Normally it will ask to confirm before calling a number/person/business you've never called before, but perhaps with emergency services it's a bit looser? Regardless, I was pretty surprised that it misunderstood my prompt so dramatically.
• schainks 3y ago
  My kid in the future probably will want to have a conversation with a machine that sounds and talks like a character from a book or school lesson. ChatGPT has gotten us there in writing, and the AI generated vocals are already really close. Unless apple acquires OpenAI, Siri is doomed.
  • sgu999 3y ago
    > Unless apple acquires OpenAI, Siri is doomed. They surely have enough ressources to train a competitive LLM themselves...
• aidenn0 3y ago
  I use an Android phone. Pretty much the only thing I use the voice commands for are setting alarms and timers. It works nearly 100% of the time, even in noisy environments. My wife has an iPhone and it's hilariously bad at this. She needs complete silence and even then it's a coin flip.
• HellDunkel 3y ago
  Ok now what about „80% of all interaction will be voice driven by 2020“. source: Verge.com , 2016. It is probably not even 1 percent.
  • nailer 3y ago
    I mean it’s Verge. It’s techs equivalent of gawker.
• zer0zzz 3y ago
  Former Apple Employee here: I still remember for one WWDC my colleague’s talk had to be altered to change all mentions of “A-Series” socs to “A7 and later” to avoid triggering “Hey Siri” on every single person’s phone in the audience.
  • m_st 3y ago
    That made my day! Just a few weeks ago I was watching a 'Shrinking' episode on Apple TV where they said "Hey Siri play <some-song>" and then my HomePod saying "OK I'll play <some-song> for you" and me yelling back "Hey Siri stop! I'm watching TV". Modern live...
    • pdpi 3y ago
      One of the guys on the Cracking the Cryptic sudoku Youtube channel keeps accidentally triggering Alexa on his videos. It's pretty funny.
    • BillinghamJ 3y ago
      Surprised for that to happen from an Apple TV+ series. I was under the impression all voice assistants had a standard way to play inaudible sound to briefly disable their activation for this exact situation
    • KyeRussell 3y ago
      Ah, well, if Shrinking has Ted Lasso-tier product placement, I’ll probably move it further down my list.
      • m_st 3y ago
        Yes well too bad, there‘s plenty of Apple product placement. And I still find it strange to have a TV show starting with an Apple logo. But Shrinking is really worth watching.
  • mitemte 3y ago
    A scene in the second most recent episode of Ted Lasso, when a character uses Siri on their iPhone triggered Siri on my HomePod Mini in the same room. Siri attempted to follow the instructions spoken by the character but failed miserably. If Apple is going to plug their half baked assistant in their shows, the least they could do is prevent it from being invoked. It may vary by language – I’m in Australia and the character speaking has a British accent, yet sounds nothing like me. There was also a period of about 18 months where running water in my shower would trigger Siri on my Apple Watch. Dismissing Siri was pointless, as it’d get triggered again 5 seconds later.
• m_st 3y ago
  I use Siri for laundry timers on Apple Watch. A very simple task you'd think, but it occasionally tells me that this doesn't work without my iPhone nearby, even though it's an activate LTE watch and there's even WIFI available. Then I use Siri a lot with my HomePods for music. It works rather well, but when it fails it hurts. Sometimes a new song is playing that I like. So I say "Hey Siri add this song to my inbox playlist." Siri then occasionally tells me "OK, I'm playing some-other-song-you-didn't-ask-for." There is then no way to return back to the previous song or find out what it was. I hate Siri when these things happen.
• anon1234 3y ago
  People use it to - start and stop timers - start stop playing if music - ask if it will rain Tommorrow For $1B+ invested.
• nextlevelwizard 3y ago
  I tried using Siri for a while, but the amount of miss fires on my watch made me discontinue. The slight convenience of being able to (most of the time) set a timer or something paled in comparison for it to trigger off of random conversation and then try to search for something nonsensical and loudly proclaiming it couldn't find anything.
• louison11 3y ago
  And yet Apple still has a massive moat around Siri because there is no official way (as far as I know) to replace Siri by another assistant when pressing the side button or saying "Hey..." I believe if you want to use Google Assistant your best bet is to say something like "Hey Siri, use Google Assistant." (honestly haven't even tried because of how ridiculous that is). So they're clearly still in prime position to make their product better, even if they're behind right now. That's unless they get an antitrust lawsuit for unfair monopoly, which they probably should get considering this seems to me similar to what Windows was doing forcing IE as the default browser back in the days. Just like people should be able to choose their default browser, they should be able to choose their default voice assistant.
  • Nimitz14 3y ago
    Yes!! I would love to work on a startup that creates a new assistant but distribution is not possible at the moment!
• knallfrosch 3y ago
  I remember when Siri came out and people wanted to show it off. It understood maybe 10% of commands. So Apple is improving it, just very very slowly.
• highwaylights 3y ago
  What bugs me the most about this is how fixable it is. Apple is now at a point where even the oldest supported devices on their latest operating systems have either decent dedicated ML hardware or are Intel-based machines with enough compute power that they should really be able to do a much better job with inferencing locally (and the server component is irrelevant to local device capabilities anyway). It should’ve been possible to bin Siri’s backend and rebuild something better from scratch by now. That Apple is swimming in money just makes things like this more jarring. It’s honestly my greatest gripe with Apple as a software company. They put a lot of effort into polishing what they release but seemingly very little into maintaining it afterwards. macOS is the worst offender, where basic and fundamental things stay broken for years on end (settings not being applied after selection in the UI, permissions being set in the UI but not actually taking effect despite being set, continuity stopping working silently in FaceTime and iMessage. It’s gotten so bad I just accept that some former tentpole features no longer exist because they’ve become so broken and no-one cares to fix them). Back to Siri though, it’s gotten substantially worse than when I used to use it on an iPhone 4S. That’s a decade plus of consistent regression while Google Assistant continues to progress. It’s so bad, and can’t be replaced, that I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a leading cause of people exiting the eco-system altogether.
  • ETH_start 3y ago
    Siri reveals the problem with deep integration using proprietary standards. A modular stack designed around interoperability and open standards makes it far easier to swap a subpar software service with a superior one. Conversely, deep integration using custom interfaces requires redesign of many stack components to switch to a different design principle for just one component.
  • soup10 3y ago
    > That Apple is swimming in money just makes things like this more jarring. This is a common theme. Big Tech Company X is rich therefore they should be able to do Y. But corporations don't really work that way, they build a monopoly around a few domains and then their organization is structured to maintain that monopoly. It's the exception, not the norm, for established companies to gain competency in a new domain, and it usually comes with an acquisition or a special initiative by senior management.
• meling 3y ago
  What is people’s experience with Tesla’s voice recognition system? I’ve previously used it to activate the windshield wipers, which worked. But recently I tried to get it to play music and various other things, none of which it was able to do… I was driving and haven’t had time to play around with it since.
• Osiris 3y ago
  I ride a motorcycle and rely on voice commands to interact with my phone since I keep it in my pocket. Siri’s most common response to me: “You have to unlock your iPhone to do that”. Not helpful.
  • mcv 3y ago
    I have the opposite problem: Siri, or more recently Google's version of it, butting into a conversation because it thinks it heard something. Very annoying. I recently kicked Google Search off my phone because that seemed to be the only way to get rid of it. This stuff needs to be optional and not forced down our throats, and it needs to be more user-controlled, work when we want it and not when we don't want it.
• mixcocam 3y ago
  Although Siri needs much improvement I have found that voice typing on iphone has actually improved dramatically the last few months. I have been using it more and more to send email and messages.
• qwertox 3y ago
  As an Android user, I'm even struggling to get my phone to set a timer, which is the only thing I use Google Assistant for. I can't wait for them to start including LLM-AI voice chatting where one can properly tell the phone what I want it to do.
• knolan 3y ago
  I’ve noticed that the whole the voice to text recognition it pretty good, what’s awful is how that text is interpreted. You see the same problems with search in other Apple services. For example you might search for a street in maps and search will just give up and just give you a half arsed result. Searching for HN Boulevard might instead HN Avenue even though you can see the correct result right there on the map. You see similar behaviour in Music, App Store etc.
• alfiedotwtf 3y ago
  Hey Siri, set a timer for 13 minutes. Hey Siri, set an alarm for 8:30 tonight. That's about all of Siri I've ever found useful in the past 10 years or so
• footlose_3815 3y ago
  I think it's not far-fetched to say that everyone hates brand-promoting voice assistants whose job first is to make money for a company. I don't trust any voice assistant because I know every query is being stored, analyzed, and I don't own my own communications with the asssistant. I also don't get to customize the assistant. It's basically a shitty-future branding assistant who is inclined to send you to product pages and shit to buy.
• srg0 3y ago
  There is one killer application for voice assistants: answering phone calls. I wish Siri could respond to all unknown phone numbers, screen promotional and robocalls, take notes if necessary and report what's important to me (and I need to be able to tell her what's NOT important). This is what the assistants should do, not switching lights or trying to play a random song. Neither Siri nor its competition can do this. Speech recognition accuracy is not really important, it can just take voice notes as a fallback, or ask to "press 1" to talk to me directly.
  • kaicianflone 3y ago
    I remember Google showing this kind of tech off a year or two at their dev conference. Was it just vaporware with a person in the back using a synthesized voice? We’re waiting google
    • SilverBirch 3y ago
      Google's demonstration was kinda "Hey! We've got this great feature where our personal assistant will piss off everyone you interact with in order to save you 10 seconds making a dinner reservation". I'm not surprised it went no where.
• JustSomeNobody 3y ago
  At the very least, make it work in the car! I have an iPhone and a Pixel and my car supports AA and CarPlay. When I travel, I much prefer AA because the Google's voice assistant nails AA interaction.
• cj 3y ago
  I have a homepod in every room in my house. I talk to Siri every day. He (she's set to an Australian male voice) is great if you know exactly what to say to get exactly what you want. He's horrible with general requests that you haven't made before. Particularly with smart home devices.
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• reddog 3y ago
  Siri rarely disappointed me because my expectations were always low and I trained myself on how to talk to it. But now after some remarkable experiences using GPT-4 I find I’ve lost a lot of patience with all the different voice assistants. They are just so stupid in comparison. How much longer before LLMs and projects like Whisper run the backend?
  • ant6n 3y ago
    The worst are the telephone chatbots. My bank’s is so incredible obnoxious and stupid that by the time you get to a human, the blood is boiling and its hard to get back to a professional level. If they need to do automatic triage (probably they dont), why not just use a old school “press 3 for x” assistant.
  • w0m 3y ago
    Bing app on mobile is functionally that now (kind of). I need it to control my lights though.
• 1letterunixname 3y ago
  It can be made better. Alexa and Siri both suffer from fixed prompts.
• falaki 3y ago
  As a former Apple employee working on Siri, it is safe to say many Apple employees hated Siri even 10 years ago. Many tried to introduce new ideas to improve it, but, at least while I was there, nothing changed.
• 404mm 3y ago
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• pcurve 3y ago
  sigh. While there's some exception, in general I really feel Apple makes crappy software, especially the ones that human input. They do a much better job of unifying device experience through software.
• awill88 3y ago
  Don’t really rely on Siri that much. I absolutely hated Apple as a kid, but I dunno. Apple can take their time rummaging through my data in my humble opinion. Like, do they need to be the leader of ML when we all know what it takes to improve the models.. all of our data.. so, yeah.. I’m good with this.
• anonzzzies 3y ago
  Siri and the Apple mobile keyboard are both jokes. It often seems like a joke what they produce. Even before LLMs predicting the next word was not that hard in 2-3 word phrases. But now that we have LLMs that are pretty good, Siri seems like a real joke. Is the manager of this product permanently drunk or something? Oh yeah, the keyboard replacing fuck with duck even though I never wrote duck until now is enough reason to pop over to Android.
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• mensetmanusman 3y ago
  Q: $any_question?$ Siri: let me see what I found on the web about f(misspelling, $any_question?$)
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• baseline-shift 3y ago
  I find it the worst when giving driving directions for most streets and towns in New Zealand because Siri has not been trained recognize or pronounce Maori names. So you ask for directions to ie Oneroa (oh-ner-ROW-a) will attempt to find own-ERRR-ua and explain that it doesn't exist. What laziness! How hard is it to train siri in all languages?
• tremere 3y ago
  Strange timing since Siri has recently gotten a lot better and looks to be revamped entirely in iOS 17.